Senate ratifies ABM treaty, Aug. 3, 1972

The Senate voted on this day in 1972 to ratify an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty that had been signed in Moscow in May of that year by President Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The vote was 88 to 2. At the same summit meeting, the two superpower leaders also signed an interim agreement and protocol limiting each nation’s strategic offensive weapons. This package came to be known as SALT I.

Sens. James Allen (D-Ala.) and James Buckley (R-N.Y.) cast “no” votes. Both lawmakers argued that the treaty, by limiting each nation to two ABM sites, each of which was to be limited to 100 anti-ballistic missiles, would expose their civilian populations to destruction in the event of a nuclear war. Allen further questioned whether the United States could trust the Soviet Union to live up to the treaty and the interim agreement.

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The chief motive behind the ABM treaty was to slow, if not altogether end, an emerging competition in defensive systems that threatened to spur offensive competition to ever greater heights.

A subsequent 1976 protocol to the treaty cut the number of ABM deployment areas from two to one. They could either ring each nation’s capital or, alternatively, be mounted at a single ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) site. The Soviet Union deployed an ABM system around Moscow, but the United States chose not to respond. In 1976, the United States also deactivated its site at Grand Forks, North Dakota, located at a Minuteman ICBM launch area.

Over the ensuing years, the United States and the Soviet Union extensively modified the ABM treaty via amendments and various common understandings and protocols. They also held five-year review meetings in Geneva.

Although the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, the treaty continued in force. A memorandum of understanding was exchanged in 1997 establishing, for the purposes of the treaty, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine as successor states to the Soviet Union.

On Dec. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush notified the Kremlin that he intended to withdraw from the treaty. (A clause allowed either party to terminate the pact upon six months’ notice “if extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests.”)

This was the first time the United States had withdrawn from a major international arms treaty. Bush’s move cleared the way for the creation of the Missile Defense Agency in the Defense Department. While Russian President Vladimir Putin called Bush’s decision “a mistake,” he nevertheless said U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system weren’t directed against Russia.

The United States and Russia signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in Moscow on May 24, 2002. This pact mandates cuts in deployed strategic nuclear warheads, but without mandating cuts to their total stockpiled warheads, and without providing for any enforcement mechanism.